Moriarty Visits The Editing Room Of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 And Meets Jerry Bruckheimer!!

As long as I’ve been in LA, Jerry Bruckheimer has been one of the biggest names in film production. The second day I lived in town, I went to the Chinese theater to see the opening day of DAYS OF THUNDER, the first film to play there in DTS digital sound. It wasn’t a great film, but it was a heck of an introduction to a theater I’d been reading about since I was a kid, and it felt appropriate to see a “movie movie” there. More than anything, that’s what Bruckheimer does. He makes “movie movies.” His films don’t take place in any sort of real world, and that’s what makes them work. When they work. I’ll confess, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with his movies. If I were to divvy them up, I’d put BEVERLY HILLS COP, THIEF, AMERICAN GIGOLO, MARCH OR DIE, THE REF, CRIMSON TIDE, BLACK HAWK DOWN, BAD BOYS II, NATIONAL TREASURE, and even GLORY ROAD in the category of films of his that I enjoyed. The film I think I was least expecting to like that I was most persuasively won over by was PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL. When it was first announced, I thought it sounded as wrong-headed as possible. Basing a film on a theme park ride seemed like the crassest, most blatant form of corporate synergy possible.

And, yet, somehow... it worked. Even during production, there were stories floating around town about executives panicking the first time they saw dailies of Johnny Depp’s performance, and there were questions about the untested star power of Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley. Even so, all of that disappeared as soon as the film was released. Audiences fell in love with Captain Jack Sparrow something fierce, and the film became a sensation that summer. Now, only a few years later, we’re looking at another part two-part three double-header, one this summer and one in 2007, and the real question is “Can they do it again?” If the odds were stacked against them the first time, I’d say they’re doubled at this point. Sequels are, by definition, lesser than the original. Time and time again, they end up being pale shadows of whatever worked the first time out, and they burn down audience affection fairly quickly.

One thing that they have on their side is the fact that they’ve brought back everyone. And I mean everyone. As much as Johnny Depp was a key piece of the puzzle, he wasn’t the whole picture. I think Gore Verbinski is one of those directors who really is the whole package. He chooses to make really commercial fare, but I like the way he approaches filmmaking. I think he’s got a strong visual style, but he doesn’t overpower the films he’s making. He’s not just going to ladle on the style for the sake of it. Instead, he seems to appreciate a good script and he definitely makes room for his actors to have fun and contribute truly special work. Those are valuable skills that many A-listers don’t possess, and I think part of what made the first PIRATES work was the way it managed to include some sly nods to the ride without ever feeling perfunctory or like a simple commercial.

The supporting cast in that first film was pretty great, too, whether talking about Geoffrey Rush, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, or Mackenzie Crook. The film was cast really well, and everyone seemed to dial in on the exact same tone, the same sense of swashbuckling fun. Bringing back that entire extended cast makes sense, and the fun this time comes from adding new personalities to the mix, people that are going to fill out the world in interesting new ways.

All of this is precursor... the long way of setting up the encounter I had when I got back to town a little over a week ago. I’d just spent 12 days onset for my new episode of MASTERS OF HORROR, having the time of my life, but the morning after wrap, I hopped in the car and drove for 22 straight hours without pause, hoping to make it back in LA in time to make an appointment on the Fox lot. See, that’s where the dubbing stage and editing rooms are that are currently in use by the PIRATES 2 team. They’re hard at work finishing the film, and I was invited to step into the tail end of that process and see what they’ve been up to.

When I showed up, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to be seeing. I signed in at the front desk, took a wrong turn through the editorial department of MIAMI VICE (oh, man, did I want to peek), and then finally found my way into the post-offices for PIRATES 2.

I stood there for a moment, looking around, when Jerry Bruckheimer walked in. He’s compact but commanding, and he gave me a friendly, relaxed handshake as I introduced myself. No small talk. No hard sell up front. He just indicated one of the closest doors and we walked into a small editing suite where one of the editors was waiting. Altogether, I saw about 45 minutes of the film, sequences from the very opening to several major set pieces and a fair sampling of big character beats. As we watched the sequences, Jerry filled in the gaps for me, setting up scenes and then narrating to fill in for missing footage. It was just the three of us in the room, and I have to say... the confidence he exuded about what Disney is releasing on July 7th was pretty infectious. He told me that they haven’t test-screened the film because they just... can’t. The film is still being finished, with final FX work arriving and sound mixing underway, and because of the way this film works, showing an unfinished version to audiences really wouldn’t work for anyone.

I don’t recommend films simply for visual effects work. At this point, there are several companies who routinely do excellent work, and the bar has been raised so high that people have stopped noticing innovation. From film to film right now, software gets refined or rendering power gets increased or people perfect certain tools, and everything is so cutting edge that nothing is. It takes a lot for me to really stop and stare at something in confusion.

Hats off, then, to the guys at ILM this time around for their work on the crew of Davy Jones’s ship. These cursed souls have started to change into creatures of the sea in strange and disturbing ways. Every one of his crewmen are elaborately designed. And every one of those make-up jobs in this film were done digitally. These aren’t entirely CGI creations, either. These are digital make-up jobs done to the actors who are absolutely giving the performances you’re watching. Performance capture appears to be where the real technical cutting edge is at the moment. Andy Serkis’s performance as King Kong is, no matter what you think of the movie, a milestone in cinema because of the way it combines technology and craft. It’s inspirational, goddammit. You can do things now you could never do before, and it seems like people are just starting to take full advantage of what’s possible.

But I’m getting ahead of myself... more on Davy Jones in a few. First, let’s touch on some of the broad strokes of the story. I’m not going to totally give away all the story stuff I saw, because part of the pleasure of this one is the way it connects to the first film in unexpected little ways. Watch for the monkey, for example. He makes some outstanding appearances here. You’ll finally see why Jack Sparrow’s compass never worked in the first film. In fact, the stuff I saw strongly suggested that there was a lot of really subtle groundwork in that first film that set up things that will pay off not only in this movie, but in the third as well.

The film opens on a dark note, as we see the detritus of a ruined wedding. We find Elizabeth, played once more by Kiera Knightley, there in the midst of what was supposed to be a happy day. Soldiers march in, and Elizabeth finds herself arrested for helping to free a pirate who had been legally sentenced. Will, played by Bloom, is also arrested, and both of them are read their sentences by the man in charge, Lord Cutler Beckett, played by series newcomer Tom Hollander. He’s got personal reasons for orchestrating the arrest of Elizabeth and Will, and he reveals a little bit of that when he offers Will a way out of trouble. All Will has to do is find Jack Sparrow and bring him back. Beckett wants Jack, but he also wants that “broken” compass that Jack carries with him. He sees Jack as the means to an end, the end being the capture of Davy Jones himself.

Governor Swann (Jonathan Pryce) stays with Elizabeth, determined to find some way to free her, while Will leaves to take Beckett up on his offer. That’s pretty much the whole set-up that I saw, and it’s efficient and well-done and it gets things in motion quickly. What I didn’t see was Johnny Depp’s introduction in the film. “You should see that in the theater,” Bruckheimer said. “It’s pretty special.” Instead, we jumped forward into the film, and Bruckheimer explained that Jack Sparrow has decided to stay off the water as much as possible, so Will’s forced to search for him on land. On an island, to be more specific, which is where all of the cannibal stuff comes in. Oh, yeah, there are cannibals in this film, and they are, frankly, hilarious. They’re a menace, but Verbinski’s visual wit makes these scenes funny like a Charles Addams cartoon. Sinister funny.

Jack Sparrow is a slightly different character this time around. He spent all of the first film determined to reclaim possession of The Black Pearl, and it seemed like it was just because it was his ship. But in this film, we learn that Sparrow paid a very high price for the Pearl in the first place, and then managed to not even enjoy the benefits of being a Captain because he lost the ship for a while. Basically, the check for that price has finally come in, and Sparrow doesn’t want to pay it. He’s on the run, but the person he’s running from has unlimited resources to expend in an effort to catch Jack.

And that, of course, is Davy Jones. Bill Nighy, who’s been on a real roll lately, is going to be one of the most iconic screen creations of the year as Davy. Every single moment of screen time I saw with him was fascinating. It’s a well-imagined character, but beyond that, watching how Nighy inhabits this digital make-up is remarkable. I was shown footage of Nighy live on-set, and then I was shown the finished footage of him in the film, and it’s remarkable. The crazy details, like the way the body of the octopus throbs on the back of his head like a brain-sac or the way he blows air through his lips when exasperated, are what sell Davy Jones as real. Also, the film has big enough balls to do many of the Jones sequences in harsh, bright sunlight, daring you to find something wrong with what you’re seeing. Davy Jones and his crew are all different, all designed with that same rich attention to detail, and all of them fully-articulated to the same degree.

Check out some of these images, like this one of Hadras...

... or these of Koleniko...

... or this of The Twins...

... or this picture of Maccus...

... or these images of Wheelback...

... or these two Clanker images...

... or even Davy Jones himself.

Now, those images don’t really do justice to what you’ll see in the film. They just suggest how each of the pirates is different. Seems that these men who serve on Davy’s crew are the men who have fallen overboard from other ships. Given the chance to join the crew of Davy Jones or drown, these men take this watery half-life, and then gradually, the ocean changes them. There’s one guy I saw in one sequence who has literally grown into the side of the ship on the inside, like barnacles, and when he tries to pull away to lean forward, he ends up exposing his brain. It’s twisted, beautiful work.

And as if having a totally supernatural crew wasn’t enough, Davy Jones has a weapon at his disposal, something that no man would ever want to face on the open waters, something that the trailers hint at but barely show. Yes... The Kraken. And, oh, man, the Kraken is fun. I saw two Kraken scenes, and both were exhilaratingly-staged.

Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Will, Jack, and Elizabeth all end up traveling with different groups, but all of them end up with the same goal: find the chest of Davy Jones, the Dead Man’s Chest. Inside, there’s something that can either be used or destroyed depending on what someone hopes to accomplish. Before they go on their separate ways, Jack and Will go together to visit Tia Dalma, a voodoo priestess played by the stunning Naomie Harris, who you might recognize from 28 DAYS LATER, but who was recently so great in TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK & BULL STORY. Her scenes with Johnny are awesome, and it really shows how much Verbinski loves to set up two good actors in a crazy environment and then really let them go. She rips it up, and Johnny chews the scenery keeping perfect pace with her. She’s the one who sets the second half of the film in motion, laying out what might happen and starting the ticking clock running.

The last big sequence I was shown was once the location of the Dead Man’s Chest has been discovered, and everyone converges on the location at once. What they find is something you should see in the film, but know that Jack and Norrington (Jack Davenport) and Will end up in a wild three-way swordfight that is pretty amazingly staged, while Elizabeth has to fight off Pintel (Arenberg) and Ragetti (Crook) at the same time. This leads, one presumes, into a much larger showdown, but what I saw was already as big as any action sequence I’ve seen staged in recent memory.

There’s no question... this is a gigantic, expensive, risky movie for Disney. It’s not as risky as trying to sell something no one’s ever heard of, but there’s still a lot of pressure on the filmmakers to succeed and to justify the massive bill required to bring this one to life. This is risky because the first film was such a happy accident, a great example of chemistry gone right, and trying to recreate that can sometimes be a losing proposition and even irritate an audience enough to ruin their affection for the original.

That won’t happen here. This is as smart and as solid a sequel as I can imagine Hollywood making at this point. It looks like they listened to the audience of the original, and they really thought about what worked. This thing wasn’t rushed, and you can tell. Every frame of what I saw had been lavished with attention and was packed with layer upon layer of things to look at and to rewatch. This looks to be one of those rare sequels that actually makes the first film richer if everything pays off as well as what I saw. Although I wasn’t exactly dying to see a sequel to PIRATES when it was first announced, this has won me over, little by little. That last trailer was a pretty much flawless blockbuster trailer, and that’s when I really started to suspect that this one might be something special. Seeing this footage and spending the time listening to Bruckheimer talking about what they’ve done convinced me completely.

Before I left the building, Bruckheimer took me into the actual dubbing stage, where Verbinski was hard at work. Standing there, both of us exhausted for different reasons, we shook hands and said hello, and we talked for a moment about the film. I could see that his eyes were even more red-rimmed than mine, so I let him get back to it and headed for the door. Bruckheimer walked with me a little further, and we stopped in the lobby of the building.

I asked him if he remembered the Joel Silver comedy series ACTION, and he didn’t at first. “It’s the one where Jay Mohr basically played the most toxic producer ever...”

”Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sure. I remember that.”

I told him that I never watched it when it was on the air, but that I’d recently been watching it on DVD, and there was a line that made me laugh in a different way that I’m sure it was intended in the wake of CUTTHROAT ISLAND, where Mohr’s character Peter Dragon was listing off the rules of being a producer, and three out of the ten rules were “Never make a pirate movie.”

If you’d seen how he smiled, you’d know just how big a hit PIRATES 2 is going to be. Count on it.

Some of the creatures look like the creatures from that Dr. Who episode form the Sylverster McCoy season. Whatever. I&#39;m excited to see that and what I just read, made me even more excited! BTW: Am I the only one who is happy that Arenberg and Crook are back?

I didn&#39;t notice a spoiler tag on the link and I thought there would be some spoilers in there. I was right, there is a little. I skipped over it but I think you should put a spoiler tag on it. This is one movie I&#39;m trying to know as little as possible for. From what I read it sounds like it&#39;s going to be a good movie. The first one was good, didn&#39;t even see it till it came out on dvd. My friend was dying to see this since it was announced and I was kinda hesitant, but after the second trailer I finally became excited. This article, minus the spoilers, got me a little more excited to see it.

Harry: you simply cannot write an article stating your excitement has incresed for a movie because you&#39;ve been given the grand tour by one of the producers. The ONLY reason I read this site is because I hold on to the shread of hope that you guys haven&#39;t been annexed by Hollywood. Please don&#39;t shit in your own bed.

Damn fine write-up. I loved the first PotC and have been looking forward to this since then. The Cthuloid pirates only solidified my anticipation. But, to hear how the film is actually looking and coming along - damn. Yo ho fucking ho, mateys!

...It was simply configured to point towards the Aztec treasure, rather than magnetic north. And what&#39;s with this statement that the odds for success are going to be doubly hard this time? Are you insane? At this point, they could release 2 hours of test pattern and it would be a box office smash--just so long as they continue to call it Pirates 2, and play up Johnny Depp&#39;s role. Granted, such a plan would bite them in the ass when it came time to release Pirates 3, but still, that was one preposterous statement.

Cool details and all, thanks and everything... But stating Pirates 2 as a risk is downright hilarious. This movie is going to print its own money, and we&#39;ll all be better for it.

June 16, 2006, 10:24 a.m. CST

by cyberskunk

I dreamt last night that I was going through a revamped Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, except part of the time, I had no &#39;boat&#39; so I was swimming for some reason. I didn&#39;t see any animatronics, but it was dark and cavernous and the boat went through a waterfall at one point.

And you better fucking believe that! I love how the first movie threw caution to the wind and just had this instinctive feel. It wasn&#39;t a straight comedy, action/adventure or drama but all mashed together which made for a lot of fun - something which most movies now forget to be (see the three Star Wars prequels). The scale felt huge, cinematic. The cast was perfect, even Bloom who was still fairly wooden but it worked for this. One of the best big movies in the last 10 years.

Shillin&#39; some more for soulless product, eh Moriarty? What will be even cooler is the 2 1/2 hours I&#39;ll save avoiding this movie. I know Depp is doing this to get his small stuff funded, but that&#39;s not worth MY time.

Woulda been interesting. Pirates represents the newer, more family oriented JB... i miss the old, Con Air/The Rock/etc JB. I guess when BB2 and Pirates came out around the same time and Pirates made 2x as much he saw where his bread and butter was and gave up. On his board (not sure if its still up) it wasnt too long after that he announced that BB3 and BHC4 were no longer in development. *sigh*

Both the look and the names of Davey Jones&#39; crew somehow remind of Clive Barker. Not the hardcore horror Clive Barker of HELLRAISER, TORTURED SOULS and the BOOKS OF BLOOD but rather the more playful Barker of the ABARAT books. Which are also set up at Disney, coincidentally.

Think of Ed Wood and Fear and Loathing, in addition to everything that Anchorite listed. Jesus, that guy has some volume of work. He&#39;s a little better than somebody like, say, Tom Cruise, at making you forget that he is who he is underneath.

I smell Wachowski 2nd and 3rd syndrome. A great first movie that didn&#39;t expect to turn into franchise but then does...and disappoints. But I hope it doesn&#39;t. The trailer looks pretty darn cool.

think so. Based on the crapy one sheet that showed up last week, I can wait for a while on transformers. Like "forever". (It&#39;s just too different from G1, which is the only Transformers series I consider to truly be TRANSFORMERS. My own problem, I&#39;m sure, but.....)

it happens it&#39;s glorious. Look at shrek 2, and how much better that was than 1. Aliens and how much better that was than the first (in my opinion). Batman begins and how much better it was than any of the batmans before it. Terminator 2 and how much better that was than the first. The Two Towers and how much better that was than Fellowship. Empire Strikes Back and how much better that was than A New Hope... What am I talking about? It happens all the time!!! GO POTC 2!!!

I find his movies dull, Pirates included. He seems to know how to put shots together and that&#39;s about it. The story for Pirates was serviceable at best, and kept reinventing its own dumb rules. Or-Blando had the personality of a sock puppet, and anorexic Kiera did nothing to arouse me. The only thing that makes it watchable is Johnny Depp, but for me, that&#39;s not enough to sustain 2 hours plus interest.

"potc2 is just one of those unanimously universal flicks that you know is good on face value because of track records of the players involved and the sheer honesty of the whole thing." -- You know, people used to say the same thing about Star Wars...

1) Armageddon is one of my favorite movies. Shocking. I can defend this, but I won&#39;t bother unless you&#39;re interested. 2) I have political differences with Depp but I will pay to see his movies every time because he&#39;s likeable and very entertaining. Contrast this with Tom Cruise who has burned his bridges, not by having controversial views but by being nuts and aggressive about his nuttiness. Yeah. Okay, that&#39;s all I have to say.

but yeah, the trailer made me excited for this, and I&#39;m somewhat against just how hugely popular the first film became. And Verbinski is a fine director, "The Ring" and "The Weatherman" are completely different films, and he did a fine job with them both.

...on Armageddon. It&#39;s a TERRIBLE movie, but like Con Air -- another wretched film, it&#39;s compulsively watchable. It&#39;s the very things that make you groan that also make it enjoyable. "Colonel Willie Sharp, United States Air Force, ma&#39;am. Requesting the permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I&#39;ve ever met." ...... You gotta love that shit.

more realistic sci-fi interpretation of what would happen if a massive meteor came rocketing towards earth.
I think we can all agree that if we had to choose between oil drillers, and the best astronauts of the most powerful nations going up there and saving our asses... we&#39;d all chose the latter.

Which I&#39;m sure must lead to an almost unfathomable series of conflicted emotions in you, being a hater of all things Hebrew. Harrison Ford (half-Jewish) being directed by the Jewish Spielberg, thrashing Nazis (your heroes). How does Bruckheimer&#39;s kosher dick taste, by the way?

back in 2003 I saw the poster for POTC (how confusing is that, same thing as Passion of the Christ. well, not that confusing) and scoffed. scoffed long and hard. like, uberscoffing. anyways, I was pleasantly surprised. here&#39;s to a rad second one.

has it stricken anybody that the name "Dead Man&#39;s Chest" is really provacative? frankly it sounds like a necrophiliac porno that spoofs POTC (kind of like Lord of the G-strings, and Playmate of the Apes...with dead people sex) with silly play on words (booty! bring &#39;er into port! I&#39;ll shiver your timbers!). My God, I&#39;ve wasted my life...

you are forgetting either 1)the Hans Zimmer score that screams in your ears "I AM EPIC! FEEEEEEEL!" or 2)a phat happenin&#39; hippity-hop-shoo-bop soundtrack, maybe something with Nelly, and Lil Jon.
This question going out to anyone here, but is Bruckheimer producing Transformers? Because remember the last Michael Bay movie minus said producer? Of course you don&#39;t. They were made for each other I guess. Like lamb and tunafeesh.

Maybe we didn&#39;t see the same movie, because Curse of the Black Pearl was a sluggish, long-winded, poorly acted (aside from Depp) spectacle in which the "rousing" nature of the genre itself was applied with all the grace and wit of an anvil falling on one&#39;s head. To me Depp&#39;s performance brought out his worst tendency -- namely, to give a performance that has absolutely nothing to do with anything around him. (Also seen in most of your examples like Chocolate Factory, Sleepy Hollow, Mexico, etc... and you&#39;re right, crap, all of them.) It didn&#39;t help that he had two of the worst young "actors" to play against for most of the film. Ed Wood... Donnie Brasco... Fear and Loathing (one of the few instances where Depp&#39;s outlandish side actually fit with the movie)... Dead Man... that&#39;s what I think about when I think of Depp. And Pirates has absolutely NOTHING to do with any of those movies. I&#39;m a bit confused because your comments imply that the subject matter of a film or its director have nothing to do with it... actually, I think it has just about everythinig to do with it. Which is why I&#39;ll easily avoid Gore Verbinski and a lumbering pirate movie and stick with something that actually might have something worth thinking about in it.

Let me ask you: a) Did you go to Pirates of the Caribbean thinking you would see "something worth thinking about?" B) did you read this article about the sequel to a movie you hate hoping you&#39;d find that the production crew had somehow come around and made a film with "things to think about", or were you simply wanting to come gawk at what you feel will undoubtedly be a trainwreck? C) Do you perceive summer blockbuster season to be fertile ground for thinking man&#39;s movies, or do you just wish Hollywood could please move some of their typically better written Autumn fare into the mix? Your answers will be interesting insight, and I say that without irony.

I recently did a presentation/essay for a history class on how pirates have been represented in film (the class wasn&#39;t as big of a joke as it sounds like). And I can tell you from painful experience that POTC is the first of atleast 100 pirate films that didn&#39;t completely suck ass. I didn&#39;t watch 100 pirate films, but I can tell you that I watched most of the high water parks (excuse the lame pun) in the genre and it&#39;s all garbage. Even the highly respected "classics" like The Sea Hawk or the Crimson Pirate are borderline unwatchable. And I am someone who watched Andrei Rublev in one sitting with a smile on my face the other night, I&#39;m not opposed to an old black and white movie with a plodding pace. However, those films are like Citizen Kane compared to some of the later garbage. Roman Polanski made a shockingly awful pirate film, Hook is just about the low point in Steven Spielberg&#39;s career, and Cutthroat Island.. well that&#39;s just as bad as everything else Renny Harlin has directed. And you can&#39;t forget the brief Italian Spaghetti Pirate genre, The Pirate Movie (an 80s musical that ranks as one of the worst films I&#39;ve ever seen), about 20 versions of Treasure Island (all of them campy) including one set in space. The Pirate genre stinks to high heaven. Strangely, I think there is still room for a great historically realistic naval epic about one of the most famous and dastardly pirates, if done in the style of Master and Commander. However, until then we have POTC, which is about a bajillion times more fun than any other pirate movie in existence.

You&#39;re an anti-semite, pure and simple, as anyone who reads your posts can attest to. Your feeble disguising of it in terms of being "anti-Israeli" is just that -- feeble. When you talk about the world being "run by rabbis" and having "been warned about these insidious people" it goes beyond politics, as you well know. Also, I&#39;d love for you to point out one single post where I&#39;ve claimed to be either Jewish or gay. If you truly only were "anti-Israeli" you wouldn&#39;t feel the need to call everyone who sees you for the fuckstick you are a Jew or gay. As it is, every post you make displays an utter hatred for Jews and gays, period. Also, pretending that you actually believe that I have more than one username shows what a coward you are. You obviously don&#39;t have the capacity to argue with more than one person so you pretend that everyone who&#39;s against you is one and the same. How fucking sad is that? It just makes you look more and more like the racist loser tinfoil-hatter you are. As I have pointed out time and time again, if you really believed I had more than one username, you would take measures to find out if it&#39;s true. And if you really believed I am a mod, why do you even come to this site? And why haven&#39;t I banned you? Nothing you say makes any sense whatsoever. The more you insist on it, the more you look like a complete ass. Put your money where your mouth is and call for proof from the administrators that I have more than one name. And again, if I&#39;m a mod and most talkbackers are me, why do you even come here? You&#39;re a phony, a coward and a racist scumsucker, homeslice.

"man my stomach is turning with nausea watching these jews rubbing their hands and drooling soullesly over prospective profits from 9/11 movies coming out every week..there is no remorse.. just naked sickly greed and dancing jews everywhere..god please bring the wind of justice fast.." ..... from the recent 9-11 TB.

Homewrecker this is the second talkback you have used in the last few days to spread your fascist thinking. Anti Zionist, fine. But you are an Anti-Semite. Not okay in my book. You can shake hands with Hitler in Hell, and tell him about your attempts on Internet Message boards to spread the word. I&#39;m sure it will get youat least a pat on the back, and maybe a reach around.

Sorry, that kind of George Wallace "some of my best friends are black" horseshit isn&#39;t fooling anyone. You&#39;re a complete anti-semite. Also, why didn&#39;t you respond to my request for posts in which I admit to being gay and Jewish? And what would it mean one way or the other if it&#39;s not JEWISHNESS per se which you loathe? And what about the administrator requests? See, homeboy, you&#39;re a phony and a coward. Your mouth is writing checks which your intellect and spinelessness can&#39;t cash.

So, you didn&#39;t like the first one, and you think you&#39;ll dislike this one. Okay. Also, you feel that this film you feel you won&#39;t like will be better than the other film you didn&#39;t like, X3. Alright, fine. So, 1) why go to this movie if it has all the earmarks of something you&#39;ll dislike? Are you just showing pure optimism with your ticket purchase hoping against hope you&#39;ll like it? Or, do you think you&#39;re complaining about something just to complain about it?

Seriously, how could Dreamworks (ie. a company run by Mr Blockbuster himself, Speilberg) actually put out a sleep-inducing DULL movie about a comet slamming into the Earth? The insane thing is, the comet doesn&#39;t hit the Earth in ARMAGEDDON but it DOES in IMPACT and they STILL made it dull. It was a 2 hour shitfest movie leading up to the stunning moment of...wow!...a big wave. >snore< Though more frightening of all, it&#39;s hard to imagine there was a time when Hollywood actually thought Tea Leoni was leading lady "star" material versus being the annoying acting hack, nasal voiced shrew that she is. Given the subject matter, he truth is ARMAGEDDON made DEEP IMPACT look like an embarrassing TV movie of the week or a bad Discovery Channel dramatization. Someone above defended IMPACT by posing the question "who would you want to see saving the earth from a comet -- oil drillers or NASA astronauts?" Well, IF the world was ACTUALLY threatened, sure, hands up we all say astronauts. But when it comes to me opening my wallet and having to pay for a full priced admission at my multiplex, and I want to see Bruckheimer-like explosions and theatrics. And pretty much everyone else felt the same way since ARMAGEDDON kicked IMPACT&#39;s ass and sent it whimpering away, its tail hung between its legs.

Yep, you&#39;ve answered it, but there&#39;s the new question of why you&#39;d even bother seeing it on HBO, or why you even read this article, for that matter. It just seems odd to me that you&#39;d invest the time in something you obviously dislike so much. That&#39;s the part I&#39;m not too sure about. It&#39;s basically what I was asking Nate Champion up a few rows.

I think you&#39;re a racist prick too. And i&#39;m definitely not Jewish or Gay. And just to stay on topic POTC 2 looks pretty goddamn awesome, but given that its a Jerry Bruckheimer film I have every reason to assume it will suck anyway.

Now see what you can do about moviemack. And Tom Bodet, simply because he&#39;s never, ever been funny in any way. And uhm... Dead Man&#39;s chest, yeah, actally doesn&#39;t look that bad. When I heard about Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree, I thought it was a stunt gone bad.

Jack&#39;s entrance in the original up to his stepping out onto the dock ranks somewhere among my favorite scenes ever. It gives you hope when you see a confluence of writing, directing, and acting play out so well.